Ashwin Padaki
apadaki (at) seas.upenn.edu
I am a first-year Computer Science PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania advised by Sanjeev Khanna and Erik Waingarten. My research is in theoretical computer science, and I'm broadly interested in the design of sublinear algorithms for modern computational problems such as clustering and nearest neighbor search. Feel free to reach out if our interests align!
Before Penn, I studied Math and Computer Science at Columbia University. I was fortunate to have amazing mentors like Josh Alman, Karthik C. S., and Rocco Servedio.
I am fortunate to be supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
Research
- Inapproximability of Maximum Diameter Clustering for Few Clusters
with Karthik C. S., Henry Fleischmann, Kyrylo Karlov, Styopa Zharkov
arXiv | SODA 2025 - Smaller Low-Depth Circuits for Kronecker Powers
with Josh Alman, Yunfeng Guan
arXiv | SODA 2023
Teaching
I was a teaching assistant for the following classes at Columbia:
- Cryptography
(COMS 4261, Fall 2023) - Computational Complexity
(COMS 4236, Spring 2023) - Real Analysis I
(MATH 4041, Fall 2022)
In Fall 2023, I co-mentored a lecture series in
Boolean function analysis
as part of the
Columbia Undergraduate Learning Seminar in Theoretical Computer Science.
Other
- Years ago, I interned as a quantitative trader at Optiver, an options market-making firm in Chicago.
- Outside of research, I like playing soccer and tennis, going on long walks and hikes, making music, and experimenting with wordplay.